


Your Sister is a Mighty Warrior

by Coherent_Nonsense



Series: The End [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Kid Fic, Pre-Thor (2011), Sif fighting societal expectation, Sif's parents are supportive, Warrior Training
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 13:54:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13032561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coherent_Nonsense/pseuds/Coherent_Nonsense
Summary: Sif knows she is a warrior - she has never questioned that. She just needs a trainer willing to take her seriously, which isn't as simple as it sounds.





	Your Sister is a Mighty Warrior

Heimdall wasn’t her full brother – he had been born during their father’s first marriage. His mother had died while he was still fairly young, and her mother had helped to take care of him. Her father had once told her that, much to the family’s amusement, the people of Midgard had misconstrued these events and believed that Heimdall had nine mothers.

It wasn’t until after Heimdall had entered adulthood that Sif’s parents had married and produced three children. Bjorn, Finnvid and Halli were the names of Sif’s other brothers, each of them older than her. Although their levels of fanaticism varied, the three boys were enthusiastic warriors from a young age, and never left Sif out of their games. They had made it their mission to make their beloved sister the perfect girl, which, of course, ended up with her being more boyish than anything.

It had been during one of their games that Sif encountered Thor for the first time.

 

***

 

“Sif! He’s over there!”

“I’m here, Sif, come get me!”

“Go on, Sister, slay him!”

The young Sif hefted her foam staff over her shoulder and ran at Halli, who was half-hiding behind a tree. When she reached him, she paused, her little face crumpled with pretend rage.

“Die, frosty giant!” she bellowed – as much as a little girl can bellow – and swung the staff at her brother. It connected with his shoulder with a loud smack and he laughed. Then he gasped.

“Look out, Sister! There’s another behind you!”

She swivelled around as fast as she could and gazed up at Bjorn, significantly taller than her, his arms outstretched and a comically villainous expression on his face.

“No!” she screeched, smacking him repeatedly with the staff – but to no avail. He kneeled down and smothered his sister in a hug.

“Ha ha! I have you now, Sif!”

She struggled, laughing, until Finnvid came to her rescue, attacking his older brother with a foam sword. Bjorn let her go and pretended to die, making his little sister giggle.

“You, there!” an unfamiliar voice called.

The four siblings’ heads snapped up in the direction of the voice. They were playing in the royal gardens; technically they weren’t supposed to make noise in here, and they had almost been banned several times already. What they saw calmed them, though. Two young boys, about Halli’s age and both as blond as the Queen herself, stood at the end of a flower-lined pathway.

The slightly shorter one had spoken before, but now the taller one did.

“My name is Thor and this is Fandral. What are your names?”

Sif noticed her brothers’ faces change after hearing his name. She couldn’t tell what they were thinking, but there was definitely a reaction. Why?

Thinking her brothers’ silence rude, Sif answered: “I am Sif. This is Bjorn, Finnvid and Halli.” She pointed to each of her brothers as she said his name. “It is nice to meet you, Thor and Fandral. Are you brothers?”

At this the two boys grinned.

“No, we are not,” Thor answered. “I have a brother, but he is not here.”

“And I have two sisters,” Fandral added.

Sif was beginning to get suspicious of her brothers’ strange behaviour when Bjorn announced that they had to leave. The brothers’ training began in an hour and they had to get home in time to prepare. Sif pouted. She didn’t want to stop playing. Thor and Fandral looked disappointed when their new acquaintances prepared to leave, and an idea struck her.

“I do not have training! I can stay here and play, can’t I, Bjorn?”

Her eldest brother considered for a moment.

“Yes. I can pick you up later. Where will you be?”

She looked to Thor, who said “probably here, but maybe inside. If you ask at the palace doors I think Alrik will be there and he will help you find her. He is the big guard with the red beard.”

Bjorn nodded and smiled. “Have fun, little sister!”

Her brothers left, Halli patting her on the head as he walked past her.

“So!” Fandral began, a smile lighting up his face. “What shall we play?”

It was Sif’s turn to grin.

“Well I have a staff, so I must be a warrior!”

Thor stepped forward to stand beside her. “And I have a hammer!” he said, proudly lifting a small foam hammer above his head.

Fandral grimaced. “But that is not fair! I do not have a weapon and I refuse to be a frost giant again.” He paused. “There are no female warriors,” he said, eyeing Sif with suspicion.

“There are no female frost giants,” Thor pointed out with confidence, “but there are female warriors. What about the mighty Brunnhilde?”

“She is a Valkyrie, she doesn’t count.”

“Well maybe I am a Valkyrie!” Sif exclaimed.

Fandral hung his head in resignation.

“Fine. I will be the frost giant. Promise me, though, that when Loki gets back he will be the giant. I don’t like it and he is a terrible warrior anyway.”

Thor grinned. “I will only promise if you are the best frost giant you can be. You cannot simply wait for Loki.”

The three played their game for what felt like weeks – Thor and Sif worked together to track Fandral through the gardens, hiding from thunderstorms and blizzards in caves, killing wild beasts for food, and saving innocent villages from terrible fates. Eventually Fandral’s role as a giant became redundant and he joined the other two as a third warrior, using an imagined sword to smite imagined foes.

Thor’s brother never did join them, and soon enough Bjorn was back to pick her up. It wasn’t fair – she wasn’t at all ready to go home – but she was pleased to see her brother.

“Bjorn! We have been on a journey through the realms!” she cried as she bounded towards him.

“Indeed,” Thor added, “your sister is a mighty warrior!”

 

***

 

From that day on, Sif met Thor, often with Fandral, at least once a week. Before long she had met his mother, who gave her some delicious honeyed milk, and his brother, who had been quite friendly for a time. Sif never found out what she did to upset him, but whatever it was, he maintained a frosty disposition towards her from that day onwards. She didn’t meet Thor’s father, but she supposed that he was quite busy, given that he was the king. That was something it had taken Sif quite a long time to realise, actually. When Thor had first mentioned being the First Prince of Asgard, she had thought it was part of their game – it wasn’t until the queen came to fetch them from the gardens that she began to believe him.

This went on for a number of years, and Sif came to think of Thor and Fandral as her best friends. The games they played were thrilling and packed with adventure and danger. Sometimes they played in the woods instead of in the gardens, and sometimes they played on the farms. It was bliss. Eventually, however, Thor and Fandral began to talk about their upcoming warrior training, and Sif felt somewhat isolated. Even Thor’s little brother, who technically wasn’t old enough, was to begin training.

So Sif did what any confused child does - she consulted her mother.

“When do I start my training?” she had asked one afternoon, watching her mother kneading a lump of dough that would soon become bread.

The woman laughed, smiling at her daughter. “Oh, Sif. You do not have to train. You are going to be a lady – you will never be required to defend yourself, since you will always be protected.”

Sif frowned, genuinely confused. “But then how will I become a warrior?”

Her mother’s smile wilted and she looked at her daughter with a mildly puzzled expression in her eyes. “Why, my dear – do you want to be a warrior?”

“Yes,” she said simply. What was strange about that?

“Oh,” was the only reply.

There had been discussions between her parents. She knew because she had eavesdropped. Her mother was concerned about the future of a girl warrior. Would she be of use? Would anyone hire her? Would she ever marry? Her father was less concerned. She was a lady, and in today’s Asgard, she had just as many rights as men. She didn’t need to marry to survive, and she would easily be hired – she was a friend of the crown prince!

There was another issue, however: no trainer would take her. There were communal training classes in the city, but Sif’s parents were not about to send their daughter to one of those. They were nobility, and insisted on a private tutor. However, no tutor wanted to give up centuries training one girl. They wanted to train a boy, or a group of children. Sif’s brothers had been training for too long for her to join them, so there wasn’t much the family could do.

This was how it came to be that Sif trained with Thor.

Thor had already invited Fandral to train with him and his younger brother. Two was not an ideal number for training, especially with Loki being slightly too young, so Thor invited Fandral to join them with much enthusiasm. Still, three was an uneven number. When Sif explained to them the difficulties she was having finding a trainer, she was invited in an instant.

 

***

 

Frømund the trainer didn’t take Sif seriously for a long time.

Despite the fact that none of his pupils were particularly skilled at the beginning, he decided to pick on Sif’s mistakes significantly more than the others. To be fair, Thor and Loki were princes – the latter having the added excuse of being the youngest in the group by a number of years – so he wasn’t terribly inclined to pick on them. Frømund was a nervous character, and wasn’t about to risk the wrath of the House of Odin. So that left Sif and Fandral, and of the two, Frømund seemed to have taken a liking to Fandral, and maintained a flagrant disinterest in Sif. He would casually use her flaws as examples for the group, even when they were being perpetrated equally frequently by each of the others, and would, without fail, find a way to pin her mistakes on her gender. It was infuriating.

Worse – and Sif felt slightly guilty for thinking this – he would always partner her with Loki during practices. It made sense, in a way, putting the youngest pupil with the female one, but it enraged her. It wasn’t so much because it proved that Frømund thought her weaker than the others, although that alone incensed her, but that she didn’t have an opportunity to prove herself. Although she generally defeated the younger boy during sparring with ease, she felt that she always had to hold back somewhat to avoid hurting him, and could never demonstrate the full extent of her abilities to her instructor. Complicating matters was Loki’s growing coldness towards her – evidently he had picked up on her carefulness and resented it with increasing vehemence.

The change came on the day Loki was unable to come to practice. Apparently he and Thor had been playing on the glittering walkway leading to the bifrost and he had slipped off the edge into the water below. Heimdall managed to fish him out before he fell off the edge of the realm, but the cold walk back to the palace in his sodden clothes had caused him to contract a fairly violent flu, leaving him bedridden and quite unable to attend training. Thor had been reluctant to attend as well, this being the first illness he remembered in his brother’s life, but the queen forced him to go, arguing that his presence in Loki’s chambers was more disruptive than supportive.

As a result of Loki’s absence, when it came to sparring, Frømund had them rotating – Thor and Fandral first, then Sif and Fandral, then Sif and Thor and so on. During the first match, Sif watched the two boys carefully. She hadn’t had much of a chance to watch their technique, and wasn’t sure how to go about attacking either of them, especially fighting without practice weapons, as they were today. They seemed fairly well matched, and she realised it was going to be very different sparring with them than with Loki. Glancing at Frømund, she really hoped she didn’t mess up.

The match between Thor and Fandral ended up being a tie – it went on for quite a while before Frømund interrupted.

“Excellent work, you two. I think that round will have no winner. You mustn’t tire yourselves out too much; we will be doing several rotations before you leave today.” He turned around and looked at Sif as though he just noticed her presence. “Fandral,” he smiled, “it is your turn to spar with Sif first. Be careful, though. She is not as strong as you or Thor.”

Sif narrowed her eyes, an uncharacteristically smug smile finding its way onto her face as Fandral walked over to her. Sif was a girl, Sif was gentle, Sif was delicate. She couldn’t wait to shatter Frømund’s ridiculous prejudices.

“Begin!” the trainer called.

One of the earliest lessons they had been taught was not to attack first without the element of surprise – in situations such as these, where opponents were one-on-one and attack was expected, the first to lunge forwards would often leave themselves vulnerable. Bearing this in mind, Sif held her ground, keeping herself facing Fandral as he circled her. She could see it in his eyes that he was going to lose his patience first, perhaps overconfident due to Frømund’s persistent dismissal of her abilities.

She was right. With a comical roar, Fandral launched himself towards Sif, arms wide and outstretched. He looked like he was going to try to tackle her to the ground. She set her shoulders, crouching slightly, ready to meet his attack – but when he came near, when he was a mere hair’s breadth away from her, she dodged him. Fandral was startled at her sudden disappearance and lost his balance slightly. Sif took full advantage of his distraction, grabbing his shoulders and using the momentum from his charge, as well as a little of her own strength, spun him around and flipped him onto his back. The air was knocked out of Fandral’s lungs, and before he even had a chance to take another breath, Sif had pinned him down, her forearm across his neck.

“Yield!” she yelled.

“Ahh!” Fandral cringed at her volume. “I yield! Don’t shout.”

Sif stood up quickly, offering a hand to help her friend off the ground. He took it, looking more bewildered than embarrassed. The young girl levelled an almost challenging glare at her trainer. To his credit, Frømund only looked shocked for about thirty seconds before regaining his composure.

“Well done, Sif!” he exclaimed. “Now, rotate. Thor, it is your turn to fight the Valkyrie.”

Sif buried a smirk at being called a Valkyrie. She could see in his eyes that Frømund believed her victory to be a fluke, and he clearly didn’t mean the compliment he had paid her. She needed to win again.

To be fair, Sif did almost beat Thor. She held her own in the fight, which was, she could tell by his expression, more than Frømund had been expecting. Thor had been watching when Fandral was caught unawares, and wasn’t about to fall for the same trick. Sif was forced to yield, but won her next match against Fandral, and the second fight against Thor was declared a tie. She could see the pride in Thor’s eyes, and the mild irritation in Fandral’s, but what really made her day was the look of utter bafflement in Frømund’s.

At the end of training, Frømund asked Sif to stay so that he could speak with her. She was a little worried that she may have upset him in some way, but steeled her nerves. She had done nothing wrong. In fact, she was so prepared to be admonished that she was thoroughly taken aback by the trainer’s words.

“I apologise, young Sif,” he said, shifting uncomfortably, his nervous disposition becoming apparent. “I believe I have been very unfair to you in the past.”

Sif nodded weakly, unsure of how to respond.

“I promise in future to treat you with a respect that befits your talents as a warrior. You may leave.” He nodded to her and gestured towards the exit.

It wasn’t the best apology the young girl had ever heard, but she supposed it was the best she was going to get. She bowed slightly to Frømund, as etiquette required, and left the training grounds.

From that day forth, Sif was never ignored in training again. In fact, it became much more exhausting as Frømund put more and more effort into pushing her as much as he did Fandral and Thor, and when Loki returned after recovering from his illness, he had taken her place as Frømund’s least favourite pupil. She was finally beginning to earn respect as a warrior, even if that respect was only enough to have her training taken seriously. It was a start – a leap! Before she was unable even to find a trainer, and now she had proven herself, had been wholeheartedly accepted.

There were many more obstacles to overcome in her life. The path of a woman warrior was not easy, and many tried to prevent her – but the memory of that day, the day when she won the respect of her first trainer, always reminded her that it was not impossible.


End file.
